The United States Constitution is a mess. For 73 years it held together, crudely, like a quilt of bandaids, all of the piles of compromises that were required to keep petulant slave states happy. After the Civil War, the thing should have been rewritten completely and all the structural compromises designed to placate the backward states should have been removed.

It has now gotten to the point where the American system of government is one of the biggest problems facing the country. The 21st Century moves fast, and yet America has an 18th Century operating system. We are unable to keep up with the world. The last two decades have essentially been lost to idiotic gridlock and the classic “land war in Asia” blunder. We can’t afford any more lost decades.read more

Obama’s first term is nearly over. I’ve been bookmarking certain news as “Obama Derangement Syndrome” for four years. The paranoid delusional psychosis was funny for a while, and then the 2010 midterms happened. That’s when several rodeo clowns got into office and raised an amazing amount of money by peddling garbage. It was much more frightening than I anticipated.

He won a Peabody. His winning “Super PAC” segments embody some of my favorite rules – both from writing and improv:
He says his responsibility is to the story.
Whenever possible, discover the story along with the audience.
Find the complications, break through them with logic and humor.
Own the character, even when you wink in an aside.
The truth is funnier than fiction.

If you ask me, the Legal Dept. at Comedy Central deserves this award as much as Colbert and his writers. Greenlighting that bit took guts.read more

If you don’t know what this Goya riff is working from, behold: the future.

From Eater:
The owner of a café in the center of Madrid, Spain has become a hero of sorts and internet phenomenon after standing up to riot police and allowing protestors to seek refuge in his establishment. The incident took place yesterday, when thousands of protestors took to the streets to demonstrate against the government of Spanish Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy.
The man, Alberto Casillas, tells Eco Diario that he saw the whole drama unfold near the Neptune fountain, when police finally charged protestors and people began to flee the scene. “I saw a boy who was being beaten up by the police — he was bleeding — and I went to help him,” said Casillas, who let protestors inside his café. “I then stood in front of the restaurant and didn’t let the riot police in.” He also fed all of the protestors that had flocked to his business.

What if Occupy Wall Street incorporated as an investment bank and an attached savings bank? And what if at #Occupy demonstrations around the country, protestors could walk up to a little table and sign up as board members of the Occupy Corp investment bank – and then go over to a different table (crossing over what used to be that pesky regulation which Gramm–Leach–Bliley Act dissolved). And there, the poorz set up accounts on the customer-facing table: Occupy Trust. The “bank” would immediately issue a lien against the empty account, so that the bank would eat the future earning potential of these protestors. In this way, the bank gobbles up a bunch of toxic assets. Then they bet against the value of the debt on the market. Of course, insolvency looms. Then they demand and get a giant bail-out. The bail-out is split up among the millions of “board members.” The B-Story is about cops and a forbidden love affair between a protester and a cop. And there’s a bit with a dog.read more

First he dissects The Dark Knight movie in a way that basically seconds the general thesis of my Wild West script about media and theatre:

The Joker wants to disclose the truth beneath the mask, convinced that this will destroy the social order. What shall we call him? A terrorist? The Dark Knight is effectively a new version of those classic westerns Fort Apache and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which show that, in order to civilise the Wild West, the lie has to be elevated into truth: civilisation, in other words, must be grounded on a lie. The film [The Dark Knight] has been extraordinarily popular. The question is why, at this precise moment, is there this renewed need for a lie to maintain the social system?read more

“To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle. One thing that helps toward it is to keep a diary, or, at any rate, to keep some kind of record of one’s opinions about important events. Otherwise, when some particularly absurd belief is exploded by events, one may simply forget that one ever held it. Political predictions are usually wrong. But even when one makes a correct one, to discover why one was right can be very illuminating. In general, one is only right when either wish or fear coincides with reality. If one recognizes this, one cannot, of course, get rid of one’s subjective feelings, but one can to some extent insulate them from one’s thinking and make predictions cold-bloodedly, by the book of arithmetic. In private life most people are fairly realistic. When one is making out one’s weekly budget, two and two invariably make four. Politics, on the other hand, is a sort of sub-atomic or non-Euclidean word where it is quite easy for the part to be greater than the whole or for two objects to be in the same place simultaneously. Hence the contradictions and absurdities I have chronicled above, all finally traceable to a secret belief that one’s political opinions, unlike the weekly budget, will not have to be tested against solid reality.”read more

The last week of GOTV election time always makes me think of the song that was playing on a loop in my head while I worked politics in the field at the end of 2004. It was the second part of this track. God, what a nightmare. No, I don’t miss politics.

Bumped back to the top. I was trying to think of something to write about the election until I remembered that I already said what I wanted to say back in January. I’ll merely add that the number of voters who can’t tell the difference between a fireman and an arsonist only increases.

Here is my comment on the 2010 midterms:

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.read more

One hundred years ago, conservatives argued against my grandparents getting married on the grounds that they were from different religions. The conservatives rested their case on 3,459 year old essay called the ancient Bible.

Thankfully, my grandparents’ love won the fight.

When my parents were getting married, in some states it was illegal for people to get married who had different skin color. Conservatives again quoted the ancient Bible in their legal court opinions(!):

“Almighty God created the races, white, black, yellow, Malay, and red and placed them on separate continents, and but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend the races to mix.” – Judge Bazile, Caroline County, VA, 1965.read more

Considering how Copyright laws are so strictly enforced, and multinational corporations the size of Coca-Cola & Company have such control over our current government, I discovered how Coke could save the world with a single piece of paper.

How you ask?

File for Trademark Damages.

Coke has trademarked a family of Polar Bears, motion captured from living bears in captivity, for use during the holidays.

If Polar Bears go extinct as many scientists are fearing, Coke can sue the EPA and the US Government for damaging its trademark by not protecting the bears existence enough so as to maintain Coke’s “Trademark’s Viability.”read more